ABSTRACT
At a time when, for the first time since the 1950s, a sitting U.S. president won the election despite or because of the fact that he ran on an outright conspiracist platform, it seems inevitable to investigate whether or not conspiracy theorizing has been destigmatized. In a brief and necessarily sketchy fashion, I show that the appeal of anti-establishment figures such as Donald Trump, Alex Jones, or Milo Yiannopolous rests on their outsider subject position as “conspiracy theorists” which they embrace and even commercialize. At the same time, as social media and a diversification of publication platforms have eroded the role of traditional gatekeepers and the public sphere has become increasingly fragmented, hierarchies of knowledge have also come under attack – while conspiracy theories are still problematized in the mainstream media, they actually produce legitimate knowledge (and social and economic capital) in other spheres. I also show that because conspiracist subcultures have flourished since the 1970s, which rely on their own terminology and templates, there is no longer a need to develop long, full-blown theories. The question therefore arises whether conspiracy rumors and conspiracy memes have become the new dominant form of conspiracy theory.
